This is what I do too. If i need to use or test something i don't trust then I use an old phone. All of the phones use crDroid(1) and I have scripts to quickly wipe and reinstall the OS whenever I need a full nuke.
Apropos, I once had a boss who said he was running a headcount reduction pilot and anyone who had the time and availability to help him should email him saying how much time they had to spare. I cannot deny this had a satisfying elegance.
I've all-ways asked the managers can you kindly disclose all confidential business information. In which they obviously respond with condescending remarks. Then I respond with, then how am I going to give you a answer without all the knowledge of how the business runs and operates? You can go away and figure out what is going to make work for the business then you can delegate what you want me to do, it is the reason why you pay me money.
I know at least two different companies in Italy that are very hard on shoving NotebookLM and Gemini down their employees (not IT companies, talking banking/insurance/legal).
Which for the positions/roles involved does make some sense (drafting documents/research).
But it seems like most people are annoyed, because the people shoving those aren't even fully able to show how to leverage the tools, the attitude seems like "you need to do what you do right now under lots of pressure, but also find the time to understand how to use these tools in your own role".
Why is it depressing? Personally, unless the alternative is literally starving, I wouldn't want to do a job that a robot could do instead just so that I could be kept busy. That sounds like an insult to human dignity tbh.
You know what is an insult? Supermarket on my street putting on display sloppy ads with ramen bowl that has 3 different thickness chopsticks and cartoon characters with scrambled faces. Now that is an insult, because there was a human being doing that job, and I am sure there was a great "productivity boost" related to that change.
I am a heavy AI user myself, and sure as hell I am not putting my foot in that place again.
Yeah but it's the job of the elected governments to build and maintain housing, education, social and welfare systems for their population that keep up with the challenges of the times, not the responsibility of the private sector to hold back progress and inefficiency just so more people can stay in employment even if they're not needed anymore.
The governments however have been and continue to be ill prepared to the rising increases of globalisation labor offshoring and automation.
There was a news article yesterday in my EU country about a 50 year old laid off CEO of a small company that continues to be unemployed after a year because nobody will hire him anymore so he lives off welfare and oddjobs and the government unemployment office has no solution.
What happens in the future when AI and offshoring culls more white collar jobs and there will be thousands or tens of thousands of unemployable 50 year old managers with outdated skills that nobody will want to hire or re-train due to various reasons, but they still need to keep working somehow till their 70s to qualify for retirement? Sure you then go to re-train yourself to become a licensed plumber or electrician, but who will want to hire you to gain experience when they can hire the 20-something fresher rather than the 50 year old with bad knees?
> but it's the job of the elected governments to build and maintain housing, education, social and welfare systems for their population that keep up with the challenges of the times
I'd say those things are the job of the population itself, via a wide range of pluralistic institutions. The job of governments, which are just specific organizations within a much larger society, is primarily to maintain public order.
>I'd say those things are the job of the population itself, via a wide range of pluralistic institutions.
I'd agree ONLY IF I'd pay no taxes to the government. But since most middle class people pay 40%+ of their income to the state, then the state now has the responsibility to handle those challenges for us.
But if the state wants me to handle it, then sure I'd do it gladly, they just need to reimburse 90% of my tax payments so I'd have the financial resources to proactively invest in my future security.
But right now we have the worst of both worlds in the west: a huge tax burden on the middle class funding an incompetent state that takes your money, spends it like drunken sailors on bullshit, and when the shit hits the fan, just tells you it's your fault when you fall down, instead of having used your money for societal wide preemptive solutions.
> I'd agree ONLY IF I'd pay no taxes to the government. But since most middle class people pay 40%+ of their income to the state, then the state now has the responsibility to handle those challenges.
Well, no, we pay taxes for the government to fund the things government is supposed to do and is competent at. Paying the government doesn't make them responsible for or competent to handle anything every problem arising anywhere in society, any more than paying for a Netflix subscription makes Netflix responsible for or capable of handling those problems.
This is really important, because political institutions aren't just bad at handling complex social problems, but when made responsible for them, often get in the way of other individuals, communities, and institutions trying to solve those problems with much better approaches.
> But if the state wants me to handle it, then sure I'd do it gladly, they just need to reimburse all my tax payments so I'd have the financial resources to invest in my future.
Agreed. We should drastically lower taxes, and ensure that most of the resources necessary to improve society are left in the hands of society itself, and not monopolized by a single institution that's subject to perverse incentives.
But if we assume that we're stuck paying the same level of taxes for the time being, and treat those taxes merely as losses, the question reduces to whether we want a monopolistic organization run by people with ulterior motives exercising a controlling influence over our lives and livelihoods -- and often failing to solve those complex problems in the first place -- or whether we would still prefer to solve those problems for ourselves with the resources we have left. And to my mind, the latter is still preferable, even if unhelpful strangers are stealing a good chunk of my resources.
> But right now we have the worst of both worlds: a huge tax burden on the middle class funding an incompetent state that takes your money, spends it like drunken sailors on bullshit, and when the shit hits the fan just tells you it's your fault when you fall down, instead of having used your money for societal wide preemptive solutions.
Yes, that's all true. But to my point above, the only way out of this is not to expect that the incompetent grifters will somehow start behaving like competent philanthropists, but rather to contain them and minimize the grift -- either way, it's still on us to solve our own problems.
>Well, no, we pay taxes for the government to fund the things government is supposed to do and is competent at.
Which also includes the education system training you for the labor market. How is the state good at that if what they're training you for is now useless? Also includes the welfare safety net which is now failing to catch everyone falling.
>This is really important, because political institutions aren't just bad at handling complex social problems, but when made responsible for them, often get in the way of other individuals, communities, and institutions trying to solve those problems with much better approaches.
If we know they're bad at this and often responsible for the issues we have, why are we funding them so much?
Norway has their sovereign fund as a premprive solution in case the country hits a rough path in the future.
>but rather to contain them and minimize the grift
And this can only be done peacefully by defunding the incompetent state apparatus.
>either way, it's still on us to solve our own problems
Yeah but you need money for that. And we don't have money because the state is taking half of it.
> Which also includes the education system training you for the labor market.
Does it? That's an assumption many people make, but I'm not sure that this was either the original intent -- public schooling was driven largely as a tool for "liberal arts" and to assimilate immigrants -- nor something that public schooling has ever proven to be particularly good at.
> If we know they're bad at this and often responsible for the issues we have, why are we funding them so much?
Well, most people's main incentive for paying taxes is the threat of being punished for failing to do so.
> And this can only be done peacefully by defunding the incompetent state apparatus.
Agreed entirely.
> Yeah but you need money for that. And we don't have money because the state is taking half of it.
Agreed entirely, and doing away with confiscatory taxation is an important goal. But whether or not the state takes our money is not directly relevant to the question of whether the state is sufficiently trustworthy and competent to assign monopolistic control of critical aspects of our lives to.
And my position on that is that even if we can't roll back taxation, we still shouldn't trust the state with unilateral control over key aspects of our lives and livelihoods, and we'd be better off making do with the resources we retain despite taxation to provide those things for ourselves via other forms of organization or community.
Is it an insult to human dignity? Let’s go through the thought process.
Commodities are used in an enterprise. Some of the commodities are labor. That labor commodity does work. Involving automation. Eventually (so we are told) those labor commodities manage to automate some forms of labor. Making those other labor commodities redundant.
The labor commodities are discarded. Because why (sigh) use a cart when you now have a car? And you don’t even own a horse.
All of the above is presumably not an insult to human dignity. No. The insult to human dignity is being “kept busy” instead of letting billionaires hoard automation made through human labor.
Of course the real solution is not busywork. But the part about busywork was not on the top of my mind with regards to dignity in this context.
> Personally, unless the alternative is literally starving,
Assuming large-scale automation[1]: workers have in aggregate automated themselves. It takes labor to automate. And yet those former workers are now a “burden”? We’re assuming automation, so was the making of the food stuff, the transportation of the food stuff, the automation of the infrastructure maintenance... was that done or not? Where is the burden being felt?
You’re gonna call the people that built everything a burden?
Either we are talking in terms of propagandistic guilt assignment, or we’re talking realpolitics. Either:
1. we can trivially support the “burden” because of automation (no burden); or
2. billionaire resource hoarders (a burden?) do not need the vast majority of their underlings (maybe just a few for Epstein 2.0) and can let them fend for themselves or die off. (It’s literally not even a question of whether they have a big red Automation Button that would sustain the “burden” indefinitely. What incentive do they have to press it?)
More jobless are a burden in a capitalism based social security system.
Has nothing to do if those build something useful or not. Caputalism doesn't care.
In the end the upper 0.1% get the profit and those who still have jobs have to finance the social security systems. More jobless and less working means the jobless become a burden and in the long run the system will fail.
So you either need to tax automation or the rich.
Guess if that will happen.
I know you are speaking in real terms about how the system works. But I don’t need to describe that system in such utterly system-serving (for lack of words) terms.
> In the end the upper 0.1% get the profit and those who still have jobs have to finance the social security systems. More jobless and less working means the jobless become a burden and in the long run the system will fail.
np, it's happening to me at least once a week now. I'm also sometimes choosing to reply to them in the hopes that the hive learns over time. I want to keep teaching and helping on line, but it seems like crypto bros and other grifters want to ruin it for everyone.
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